Waking up on Tuesday morning was a shock to Carl’s system. It reminded him of why he had been avoiding Soi Cowboy recently. Once he had been the youngest detective in Asia and the bars had been his chosen social life. Then he would drink a bottle of vodka, have wild sex, for a price, with two fit dancing girls and get up the next afternoon full of energy and joie de vivre. Now Carl would wake up alone early in the morning feeling like death warmed over, promise not to drink again, and walk around all day like a pit bull going cold turkey.
Carl fiddled clumsily with the Italian coffee machine and managed to make himself a double espresso without spilling too much of the dark frothy liquid. The strong shot of coffee made his belly rumble and his first cigarette of the day brought on a fit of coughing. A dangerous combination so he climbed the stairs rapidly to the toilet to read a chapter of Churchill’s A History of the English Speaking Peoples. Carl had no idea what constipation was and why people complained about it. Thailand had always kept him regular.
Two hours later, shaved and showered — it had taken a while for him to get going — Carl arrived at the Dutchman’s house. Carl hadn’t called first as the aged hippy didn’t have a telephone. But Carl understood his habits well enough to assume he would be home. It was a small house in a medium-sized garden on a lane off a minor street at the suburban end of Sukhumvit Road.
The house was Bangkok old style and had well-matured trees in the garden and a rusty gate at the front. The Dutchman was one of Bangkok’s more famous old eccentric expat characters. He dealt antique Tibetan rugs out of his sitting room; that is to say he was mostly broke and in debt. He had been married once and his wife had foolishly tried to make him respectable.
They had established a direct mail advertising business in the late 1980s, his version of going straight. His ex-wife had been a large round woman, Thai-Chinese and madly, passionately in love with money. Her father had been a mister-fix it army major. A lot of plain brown envelopes stuffed with money had been passed to him under Bangkok coffee shop tables. He was known for having a dark side and would, for a fee, happily give somebody a serious talking to including a slap or worse. His daughter had not fallen far from the tree.
Carl knew the marriage was not a happy one when, around 1993, he noticed the Dutchman on Soi Cowboy every Tuesday falling down drunk. After several weeks of this odd behaviour Carl asked him why every Tuesday brought on such self-destructive behaviour? “Because Tuesday is the night Bla-bla-bla wants to sit on my face!” he slurred unhappily.
‘Bla-bla-bla’ was what he un-affectionately nicknamed his wife whom everybody else politely, and possibly out of fear, called Barbara although that was not her real name. She had chosen it due to an addiction to Barbara Cartland’s novels. Carl sympathized with the Dutchman’s plight. Bla-bla-bla was not the sort of woman that he could imagine in any sort of intimate situation. There was no surprise when the divorce came soon after that. She had gone away and was living in sin with her money in Vienna. He was down and out in Bangkok. It was hard to say which one of them got the best end of the deal.
The Dutchman’s maid ‘Pim’ came to the gate surrounded by ten yapping small dogs. She smiled when she saw Carl. It had been a while since he had been there last. She liked Carl in the way that women with a need to play mother to an unmanageable rogue are fond of the rogues that they do not have to be responsible for. The Dutchman was her project and the more he argued with her and the less he paid her, the fonder she grew. What Carl saw was a case of full-blown martyrdom, a functional relationship in which the Dutchman was the tantrum-throwing little boy, and she the suffering adult. Carl was confident that they would live happily ever after.
“He’s still in bed. Nothing has changed. He is still smoking too much ganja and drinking too much. There is a woman living here, watch out for her she’s another one of his whores. She’ll be gone soon, like the others. When the money runs out again she will leave.” Pim was muttering to herself in Thai as much as to Carl. He had heard it all before.
She opened the door to the house and Carl went in. It was a place he had fond memories of. Everything was old. Even the music collection was vinyl. The house contained piles of antique carpets and the smell of old wood and imported Tibetan dust. The Dutchman lived from hand to mouth even though what he had was highly valuable stock. Deep down he was trying not to sell it, as he’d grown attached to every piece of it. He always waited until the final demand bills came or the collectors were on his doorstep when it became essential to sell one of his treasured items. It became a matter of timing but time didn’t really matter to the Dutchman so he was often in trouble.
“You bloody asshole!” he boomed from halfway down the stairs in pyjamas and bedroom slippers. “Where have you been hiding? I heard your car from up the street. Still driving around like a bloody millionaire then. If you can afford to run that thing you can afford to send out for noodles and beer.” He went straight to the open door. “Pim, Pim, get in here, Carl is giving you some money to get beer and noodles. He’s hungry.”
“You mean you’re thirsty,” she muttered to him as she bustled into the house carrying a tray laden with coffee cups and water glasses.
Carl gave her five hundred baht and she went off muttering about the annoying habits of drunks and whores.
“So, Dutchman, what’s this I hear about you and a new woman in your life?”
“Did Pim call her a whore?”
“No, just muttered a lot.”
“You look good,” he told Carl sarcastically.
“Rough night,” Carl replied as he watched both of his shaky hands negotiating with the hot coffee cup.
“I thought you’d given up drinking like an Arab on his first Asian holiday.”
“So did I.”
“When you’re not completely pissed are you still tilting at windmills, saving damsels in distress and all that nonsense?”
“No, just running errands for Thailand’s white collar criminals.”
“To hell with them! Let’s go to Patpong or Soi Cowboy and get nasty drunk. Meet some naked women and smoke some shit. Just like the old days, just like the old days Carl.”
He was at least fifteen years older than Carl but was still living in adult Disneyland. The decades of smoking the coarse Thai marijuana had taken its toll on his lungs. He wheezed when he talked and he wasn’t looking good. He was one of the few men standing from the wild times of the Asian hippy trail in the 1970s but it didn’t look like it would be for too much longer.
They had become close friends in 1979 when they spent a year together smuggling rubies from Calcutta to Bangkok to defeat India’s strict foreign exchange regulations for an Indian moneychanger with an office in Bangkok’s Chinatown. It had been a year of high adrenalin including lots of alcohol and Nepali hashish. They both knew that the fact they didn’t end up in an Indian jail was more luck than good design.
The partnership had ended at Calcutta airport. The Dutchman had lost his nerve and handed one of the two boarding passes to Carl and run off to go through customs alone leaving Carl to smuggle the rubies. This was against their agreement as they had mutually decided that should they end up in an Indian prison they should not go there alone.
Carl was not concerned that he had several packs of very valuable rubies in his shoes that day as he had successfully carried out several smuggling trips by then. Unfortunately when he showed his passport and boarding pass to the Indian customs officer he was immediately accused of attempting to travel under an assumed name.
The Dutchman had handed him the wrong boarding pass. Carl’s name boldly printed on the boarding pass the Dutchman had run off with had obviously not drawn the negative attention that Carl’s possession of his had. The Dutchman was happily sitting at the bar inside the departure lounge sipping on a cold Kingfisher beer. Carl’s documentation was a different matter entirely. Teenage smugglers were always at greater risk of getting caught.
The angry officers started by accusing him of being in the CIA even though Carl explained that he carried a British passport and that the CIA were in fact an American organization. The military moustached men in their shiny customs uniforms did not see that as a relevant argument and continued to insist Carl was spying for the Americans.
The entire Calcutta customs department questioned him for forty minutes. He was frisked three times when they ran out of questions. Fortunately they stopped their search at his ankles every time and he had not been asked to remove his shoes. Carl had always been lucky.
Forty minutes later after his insistence that the girl at the airline check-in desk had handed him the wrong boarding pass, they compared the name on his passport with the flight manifest and he was let go. Which was a great relief as the penalties for smuggling gemstones were more severe than for smuggling narcotics.
He had found the Dutchman half drunk at the bar. “What took you so long?” The Dutchman asked Carl casually. Carl didn’t answer. He had already decided that his smuggling days were over. Decades later, sitting in the Dutchman’s sitting room, Carl found the memory amusing although he hadn’t thought so at the time.
“I don’t do the daytime drinking thing anymore,” Carl told him, ignoring the fact that it was exactly what he had done the day before.
The Dutchman put a vinyl record on his old Technics turntable and lit a joint. Carl recognized it as one of his favourites, ‘Monk’s Music’. The room filled up with marijuana smoke and the sound of Thelonious Monk’s piano. Oh yeah, memories were made of this.
Carl swept away the fog that was taking him back in time. He wasn’t a dope smoking gem smuggler anymore. He was a private detective, a serious person handling serious matters. It occurred to Carl that the previous day he hadn’t been very serious. Yes, he had picked up a twenty thousand dollar retainer, which is as serious as it gets, but he was still drunk before the sun went down.
Carl recognized the rising danger. He was on the verge of attempting to talk himself into something foolish again. That’s the problem with nostalgia; the past is always in front of you. But he was not falling for it that day, he decided, and he changed gear into the 21st century and declared to himself that the party was at least temporarily over.
“You’re well known for never throwing anything away. Do you still have your mailing lists from that direct mail company you ran with your ex-wife?”
“They’ll be somewhere in the garage.”
Carl knew the Dutchman had never owned a car so the garage had always been his warehouse.“Standard stuff I assume. Sports Club, Polo Club, credit card holders, golf societies, chambers of commerce and such?”
“Yeah, that sort of thing. Why are you asking?”
“I have one of those silly clients. The ones that think life is a movie and they are starring in it. Thinks his wife cheated on him when she was first married to him. Mad as a hatter I’m afraid.”
“So why the interest?”
“Someone pays you ten thousand baht for nothing it would be impolite not to take it.”
“He gave you ten thousand baht? That’s not much.”
“Oh, not for a case. Just to find out if the name he heard back then was a real person. Anyway, if someone gives me ten thousand baht to come and visit an old friend it seems like a good day to me.”
“I suppose it is,” he said without a smile.
“So we look at your lists and split the money.”
Suddenly the Dutchman was smiling from ear to ear. If Carl could read minds he would have known the Dutchman was making a mental list of all the girlie bars he was going to spend the money in.
“Wait here,” he said and shot out the backdoor.
The sounds of Monk and the boys playing ‘Well you needn’t’ from the record player washed over Carl. Don’t listen to it Dutchman, he was thinking, yes you need to!
By the time the Dutchman came back the record had finished playing. The Dutchman was bringing endless plastic bags into the house, wheezing with the effort. It took him ten minutes of sweating and puffing before he could speak.
“So what’s the name we are looking for?” he asked still out of breath.
“James Peabody, somewhere between 1993 and 1996.”
He was pulling out A4 size soft files that resembled manuscripts. They were lists of everything imaginable and most importantly the names were in alphabetical order.
“You start with this lot,” he told Carl as he started making a pile in front of him and another in front of himself.
Pim came back, clanking beer bottles. She brought beer and noodles in on another tray. She had lots of trays. Fortunately the Dutchman was too busy to care whether or not Carl drank his beer so didn’t notice that the bottle remained full. The noodles with pork were good and the chili peppers did wonders for his hangover. They both pushed the empty bowls and chopsticks into the middle of the table and got back to the task ahead.
The first file Carl picked up was marked with big letters on the front, ‘The Scandinavian Society’. No chance, but he still went through the Ps diligently. It was never a good idea to give the other person an excuse to be sloppy so Carl made sure the Dutchman saw how carefully he studied the pages. Getting people to the racetrack is one thing but spend too much time patting yourself on the back and they’ll never reach the finish line. The next file Carl picked up was a list of subscribers to Bangkok Shuho, a Japanese language newspaper. It was getting ridiculous but he went through it anyway.
An hour later brought the ‘eureka’ moment. The thinnest file of course, the least likely to succeed, the runt of the litter. It was no more than ten pages.
“What’s this?” Carl asked the Dutchman.
“Let me see.” He grabbed it from Carl’s hand. He studied it and started laughing.
Carl was in mild shock. There it was, the name he was looking for on a yellowing page, shouting at him from the analogue past. He hadn’t expected to find it. It was a case to go through the motions; it’s not like he took such an eccentric client seriously. A private detective may start his career with belief in his fellow man but life will get the better of faith and eventually make him cynical. The industry jargon is ‘paranoid survival’. Meanwhile, Carl was having a Hollywood moment. Fan-bloody-tastic!
“I had this mistress. The wife never knew,” The Dutchman said with a huge grin. “She was cute, from the North, Loei up by the border. Only Thai girl I ever knew with pink nipples. Can you believe it? Pink nipples.”
He started rolling a joint from another box, Nepali hashish this time. When he was puffing the pungent smoke he continued. Not smiling but content in that no man’s land of a happy memory.
“She worked for a travel company in the business district. A very small travel company, she was the secretary. They organized gambling tours to Macau for rich Thai-Chinese, the kind of people that could lose a million dollars in a weekend without having to commit suicide. The company made most of their real money by arranging cash when the clients gambled themselves broke. The currency control regulations in those days made it almost impossible to get large amounts out of Thailand. The company gave a horrible exchange rate and charged interest, all arranged through our old money changer in Chinatown. It took me forever to get her to make me a copy of their client list but I wasn’t going to miss out on having a list of people like that. Last time I sold it was around 1995, to a yacht marina with two million dollar houses for sale. There is a code after the names and information on the back page. Ah, here it is; high stakes poker it says. And here it says a private game on the top floor of the Lisboa casino. Not on public floors, no poker on public floors in those days. Must be rich to have been in a big private game like that.”
“What about contact details?” Carl asked him.
“Just an address and phone number.”
Just an address and phone number! It was all Carl could do to stay calm. He was having a good day, a special day. Like getting a Christmas card from Easter Island that said Happy Birthday.
“Let me write that down,” Carl said reaching for pen and paper while handing the Dutchman five thousand baht with the other hand.
Carl was in a hurry to leave. Not that he felt bad; the Dutchman had got five thousand baht for an hour’s work and was more than happy. It would not have been right to tell him the truth. It was necessary for Carl to tell lies for a living but he knew that if it became a lifestyle he would get lost. He understood the fine line between light and darkness because he walked it every day. He liked the light but was drawn to the dark side so he knew that he needed to be careful. Once he let the devil out, the party went on for days. The trouble was Carl liked it.